Episode Transcript
[00:00:21] Speaker A: That's me. That's me, that's me. This is Elisa's star and these are my thoughts. Thank you for listening. Please like and subscribe.
Today we're going to talk about cool stuff to do in Seattle. Almost everything I'm going to tell you to do is kind of free.
Like, there's almost no entry fee and there are affordable mementos waiting for you in every place. There are also expensive mementos waiting for you in every place. So whatever. However you like to vacate or visit a place, I. I've tried to make it accessible for everyone. There's also a lot of all ages options.
There are also a lot of over 21 options. So links and.
And everything are going to be in the descripty.
We all smoke weed here in Seattle. Those of us who don't smoke it, eat it or drink it, we, you will always smell weed in our city. That was true before it was legal. And now that it's legal, we're like, we're just snobbier about the kind of weed we accept, so we do other drugs in the open. Nobody here really cares. I mean, that's not exactly true. Some, like a lot of us don't want to inhale fentanyl exhaust, so. But I find that if somebody's smoking fentanyl too close to me, I can usually just move a few feet away on the sidewalk and it's fine. So cops don't bother with weed arrests unless you punch them while you're smoking weed. So don't do that. But you can get stoned anytime, any place. The weed stores here are open from 08:00 a.m. to 11:45 p.m. they're like bars in that they card. And they also offer wondrous possibilities.
The people who help you are called bud tenders. Tip them. Their job is hard. They deal with stoners all day. If you buy too much weed, you can always just give it to a homeless person. When you're on your way out of the city.
You have to be 21 in order to go into a bar or a weed store. Every single bar? Every single weed store. You can't have a picture of your id.
Passports are okay, but nothing expired because those establishments can lose their license if the people inside of them don't all have their ids on them. That's a cow. That's our Washington law. Who's gonna say California law? Where the fuck am I? That's a Washington law. So no one's gonna risk their license to stay open to let you inside. You're never gonna tuck somebody into it, so bring. Make sure you know where your idea is at all times.
Washington state law also makes bartenders, allows them to be held liable for over serving their customers. So don't say you're drunk or act wasted in front of a bartender. They will cut you the fuck off.
Also, our homeless population, we love our homeless population because most of them used to be our next door neighbors. And some of us may become homeless at any time.
Every time the price of living goes up, more apartments become empty, and the people who used to live in them now sleep on the street below.
Landlords raise those rents or sell their properties to foreign investors who raise the rent or who buy apartments and never live in them as investments underneath those empty apartments. The streets where our neighbors now live, we try. On the streets where our neighbors now live, we try to treat them with respect.
We save our leftovers for them. We try to give them blankets, weed or money. Toilet paper. Sometimes I buy socks and I pass them out.
Having said that, there's only so much anyone can do. We mostly treat them like living ghosts. You make eye contact long enough to say no or yes and hand them whatever you would like to give them when they ask for help. And then you go back to your own little world, your friends, or your phone, or even the song in your head.
Side note, grunge was also invented here. So unless you're standing next to someone who is squatting over a strange, unorganized pile of dirty belongings without any shoes, feet bloated from the harshness of living outside, you don't know who is homeless, which is a reminder to be nice to everyone. We can all see you. And if you're an asshole to someone, homeless or not, someone in our town will tell you to fuck off about it, because our homeless people are people and we treat them like that.
Okay, so then driving. Don't do it. If you drive here, try to stash your car somewhere. I've watched people from every city in the world get freaked out trying to drive in this city. There are too many cars, pedestrians, bicyclists, scooters, skateboards in the street, on the sidewalk, everywhere you go.
Someone will jump out in front of your car at least once while you're here and there's no fucking parking. Use a car. Drive yourself instead of getting a lift or taking our light rail, which we call the link, or a bus or walking, and you will add an hour to every adventure, and it will be an exhausting hour of looking for parking and muttering to each other about boring shit.
If you're visiting a friend, try and find parking near their house and just leave the car there for as long as you can.
Most of us, I mean, a lot of us, don't drive because it's a walkable city and just parking can cost hours and a day some places.
Plus most of the places I'm going to tell you about are bars filled with booze, art, yummy food, and we have some of the best weed in the Pacific Northwest, so you're not going to be sober enough to drive anyway, so just stash your car somewhere for the duration and wear some comfortable shoes. We are a walkable city, which means that anywhere you want to get to, you can without a car. Here we have a great light rail which can take you from the airport to any neighborhood you want. And we've just expanded it. It's eerily clean, safe, and there's beautiful art at every station.
I grew up in California, where BART is a light rail, bay Area rapid transit, and BART is filthy, elderly, and a little murdery, so the Seattle link always blows me away. I have never seen anywhere that clean before. That is a public space.
If the link doesn't take you exactly where you need to go, it'll get you halfway there and it'll take you to a bus. There's a bus on pretty much every corner, and every place I'm going to tell you to check out is on a bus line. So you can drink, smoke weed, or just be happy, sleepy, tired and get to your destination. So besides that, if you go this slow route, there are treats for your eyes. If you walk around Seattle, we Seattleites like to make stickers and posters and murals and put them on every stoplight pole and public surface you can see. So if you're watching this instead of listening to it, you can.
I posted this with all of the pictures I've taken over the years of stickers or graffiti or chalk that I found in Seattle and I loved or was captivated by or was surprised by or I just wanted to kill to capture kill to capture it.
So we don't. We don't tag gang signs. I mean, there are a few, but mostly we paint murals. We ask potent questions, we make grand statements.
Jesus was an ass man. Stickers with a picture of him.
We're all up and down the poles of Broadway for the whole summer of 2022. People were drawing butts next to him to illustrate the point.
You can find something sweet, funny, beautiful and sad and hand drawn on the Seattle street signs. You just have to look. We also, like I said, boop. Right on the sidewalks. We, even in the middle of winter when it's pissing down rain, you can find chalk signs on the sidewalk reminding you that we're on native land. Seattle cops are dangerous and the Palestinians deserve to be free and safe. So whether you're looking up and down the, the poles to the ground, art is all around you. In Seattle, sometimes you might come across some chalk someone left out because they want to invite you to play with us, join us and write whatever the fuck you want all over this little city.
So if you want to see, like take your own little art walk, you can, for free, you can go down to pike place Market to start with, which is cheesy and touristy and stupid.
There are some interesting shops there, there's some great art there.
There's, there's a really wonderful native art gallery. There's, you can see visi, you can watch the boats come in.
It's, it's kind of a beautiful, like pike place market is pretty beautiful and the food looks beautiful and amazing. There's some good shops.
Yeah, it's a good place to start.
It's not as local artie as I want. I'll take you to some more interesting, I'll list some more interesting, more greedy local arty places, I think, than that. But you can start there and look at some of the art and some of the galleries there, and then walk parallel to the sea and the sound. And you'll probably be able to go in and out of about a dozen galleries.
If you want to just walk towards the Seattle art museum, just map that out. It's a straight shot. And you can go into any one of those little galleries and look at their collections. They're, they're smaller than the Seattle art museum, they're usually just a couple of rooms, but it'll blow your mind, all the different collections in our town. And you can look at them all day long and then you can, you can, you can, you can stare agog at some of the amazing art. Maybe, maybe there's a postcard, maybe there's some stuff you want to like touristy buy for yourself, or maybe there isn't. You go outside, you stand there, you smoke your joint, you look at the sea for a little while and you think about what you just saw and then you get to the next gallery. So a lot of my friends have been in some of those galleries before, but none of the local artists I know out of the hundreds of local artists I know. Have ever gotten into the Seattle art museum before. And the Seattle Art museum charges $30 a pop. So fuck those guys. Don't bother with it.
Oh, oh, and while you're at Pike Place market. I forgot.
You want to go to left bank's books. If you listen to me.
Left bank books is a bookstore run by anarchists. And you'll be delighted by the chaos within. They'll have some really interesting shit.
And while you're on this downtown sojourn this long walk. Just be aware that there's no weed stores down there. So you're going to have to get your joints before you start out. So the next place to go to all of these have been all ages and free so far, entry fee wise.
The next place to go to is the downtown library on Fourth street.
It's parallel to the Seattle Art museum. Or Sam, as we like to call it.
We spent $20 million building that library.
Ten years ago. 20 years ago. Back when that was more. 20 million was more money. And so it.
It's got art embedded in the walls. It's the. The top floor has amazing views of the city and the ocean. And it's the ceilings made out of plate glass. The architecture of the building itself is amazing. But each floor has. Has different things to like art, things to discover.
The fourth floor is one of my favorite places on earth, I think. Because the walls are like, concave.
And they're like this deep, blood red. So it just feels like you're in a womb. It's like the most. It's like the happiest. I really do think it's one of the happiest places on earth. That fourth floor of the library.
It just feels good. Um, and it gives you a way to look at the whole city. Without spending $50 on the fucking space needle. Which I think is a rip off. Because, um. I don't know, it's just hokey. It's. I like looking at the space needle from other places. I like looking at it. I don't need to look at Seattle from it. Do you see what I mean?
If you're going to spend money on a view.
Well, first of all, once you go to the library. There is like a chocolate cart on the second floor. And coffee. There's chocolate and coffee. You can get a journal. You can get some used books. If you're kind of a bookstore freak.
If you want to spend money on the view, I'd go to the Ferris wheel.
There's nothing like. Because it's right on the shore there. So there's nothing like being thrown over and over a cold sea and a small plastic box over and over and over again to make you feel alive and like, you know, it. It takes you. It's a. It's a Ferris wheel, right? So you're kind of like tumbling and teetering, but you're also getting these crazy ass fucking views of the city. It's. It's marvelous and it's much more dynamic and much more interesting than the fucking space needle.
So if you're staying in town until the weekend, go to the Georgetown Trailer park mall. The Georgetown Trailer Park Mall is open every weekend. Like I said, if you stay till the weekend, that's where you want to be. So they're open from twelve to five every Saturday and twelve to six every Sunday.
The trailer park mall. Seven trailers in the backyard of a bar. The trailer park mall has been around for 20 years and it inspired the bar. Every trailer is full of a different smattering of art from all over the city. There are hundreds of artists work in those trailers.
The owner of the bar, the star Brass Lounge, just liked hanging out at the trailer park mall so much that he decided that he wanted to put a bar there. So that's how star breast Lounge became.
And it's. There's always a party going on at the trailer park mall. There's hula hooping, contests, drag shows, concerts, and all kinds of other parties there throughout the year.
The Starbrass lounge has great food and so does the rest of Airport way, where the trailer park mall sits. There's a falafel cartae, beautiful like an amazing spanish restaurant. And then my favorite bar, the nine pound hammer, is there. My favorite Georgetown bar. It offers heavy pours and the only glory hole in Georgetown. It's also the best place to fuck a welter.
So you just like walk into the nine pound hammer and pick one up off the stool. Those fingers of theirs are always very strong.
Between Boeing's factories and the airports, it's on airport way and it feels like the planes are landing very close to your head.
The ground in Georgetown has been poisoned for years. So there are a lot of old factories in the area that haven't been resold to developers, I think because of the poison groundwater. So instead they're rented to our welders and our fire dancers and glassblowers. So if you're looking for any kind of metalworker, go to Georgetown. You might find yourself on an unpaved street full of warehouses and dogs drinking whiskey. You might find yourself with a new crowd of friends while you watch a stranger play tetherball. Except the ball is on fire, so they have to hit it with a racket which is now also on fire. You might find yourself looking at other shit people have made with fire. And you might look down and find yourself realizing that the seat you're sitting in used to be part of a car.
But you find yourself surrounded by people who can create or destroy a car with their bare hands now, their bare hands and their love of fire. There's always a lot of fire in Georgetown.
Georgetown. It starts at the trailer park mall. It can end anywhere, but. But probably at a. At a welding party.
While you're in Seattle, you're gonna want to stay awake while you're. While you're having all this fun.
And I'm usually a coffee pot a day kind of a girl. I don't usually care about the taste. I just want the fucking caffeine.
But by the time I'm awake enough, I gotta be so fucking bad it sidetracks me. The whole cycle. Makes me cranky. Um, so magic mind makes these little shot bottles of yummy green energy. And one shot will keep your brain going for 8 hours. It's matcha. Usually I hate the taste of tea, but this just tastes like smoothie. It's awesome. So magic mind tastes good and you only need the one shot versus several cups of coffee. I do not miss having to run to the bathroom every hour. It's also got ashwagandha, tumeric and lion's mane and cordyceps. And cordyceps. The lion's mane and cordyceps are mushrooms. Like, they're not the fun kind of mushrooms. They're not going to make you trip out, but they do reduce swelling, and inflammation is the source of most pain. So not only do they boost your brain energy, they reduce your inflammation at the same time. And they kind of remind me that those two things are connected.
So magic mind put all that stuff in this tiny little shot and it made it tasty. And I have a ton of food allergies, but that didn't matter because magic mind's got no sugar. It's not free, it's vegan, it's keto and paleo friendly, and it includes vitamin C, B and D. And the discount they're offering to you, my listeners, is fucking off the hook.
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The jilted siren is a jewel on the hill. The food is fabulous and they have these really small plates that capture the essence of global spice traditions. So you get like thai burgers and cold ramen and these pickle plates. Oh my God, so much other stuff. And then mermaids chase each other and this giant underwater mural in the entryway. And there's usually an underwater documentary playing on the screen in the background. Every corner is a different mood so you can cuddle with your sweetie in one of the couches in the corner while a birthday party laughs at one of the big tables and strangers make friends with each other at the bar. It feels like an underwater cheers. It's a great place to meet locals or make friends and to touch base with the Seattle community. Freaks and geeks especially welcomed.
All of the bars I've mentioned are bars where I've sold before, and I do sell on a regular basis, mostly in Capitol Hill now, except the octopus bar, which I will mention in a little bit. Pony. Pony is the oldest gay bar in town. Pony is so old that they don't even have tvs on the walls because when pony opened, it wasn't possible to put a tv on the wall.
I don't know if you realize this, but gay clubs often play gay porn in the background as a way of weeding out the homophobes. The theory is that a true homophobe would be uncomfortable watching gay porn, not something lesbian bars do. I've never been in a lesbian bar that had lesbian porn on the tv, just gay male to male bars.
So theoretically, in the eighties and nineties, when gay clubs started putting gay porn on in the background in their clubs, it made the clubs themselves safer. Because if a homophobe walked in accidentally, quote unquote.
They know right away they were in the wrong place, and they could walk right back out again. And I think to a certain extent, yeah, it doesn't mean that everybody fucking knows what kind of a place this is. I get it.
But I think now we all also know that being homophobic is pretty gay. It's super hella gay.
I mean, generally, maybe you want to do it and you want to do some gay stuff, and you're mad about it. That's, like, at least part of what homophobia is, you know? Or it's patriarchy slash rape culture, right? You're. You're a man. You as a man are afraid that gay men will treat you as badly as you treat women.
You assume that their desire equals sa.
And because you're okay with Sa happening to women, that these gay men would be okay with it happening to you when.
And therefore gayness means now that you're in danger.
So I think we all know homophobia is a lot more complex than, can you handle this video going on in the background while you drink at a bar?
But the prevailing theory at the time was make the homophobes uncomfortable, so they leave. So gay porn became background noise, but ponies so old that they had to tear out pictures of gay porn from magazines and glue them to the wall, like, high school collage style, in order to keep the homophobes at bay.
So when you see those clothes, classic. Like, these are, like, from. These are from old newspapers and shit. Classic gay men. On the walls of Pony, you're looking at history.
They have a really wonderful back patio with a fire pit, a dance floor, and the only glory hole in the Capitol hill. There's also a stripper pole on the bar in case you've run out of money and you want to keep drinking, anyone's allowed to jump up on the pool.
That being said, I don't know how long you'll get before someone will kick you off.
Pony has a shot that tastes like cupcake. So I was.
I couldn't believe. I.
I couldn't believe it when I tasted it. I was like, oh, my God, have I been doing cupcakes from unicorn? The unicorn is just as fun as it sounds. It's decorated with bright colors and the corpses of dead animals just staring you right in the face. There are. There are lions and tigers and bears in there, you guys.
And most of them are real.
You know, there are some. I think there's some unicorns and, like, because it is the unicorn and so maybe. Maybe some narwhals. But even though, like, those are just, like, pictures, so, okay.
There's all, like, there's so many yummy drinks. Unicorn juice is maybe one of the best ever.
The food is delicious.
There are. Downstairs, there are arcade games, including skeeball, and there are several large dildos in the claw machine.
So down the street from that is the wild rose, the oldest lesbian bar in town.
Their dance parties are epic and safe.
The safest place to go dance.
They will always make sure you're okay at the wild rose. Their bartenders are watching out for you, and their music is always bumping.
They have this wonderful outdoor area where you can sit and drink and smoke, too. At the wild rose, it's the largest outdoor patio in Capitol Hill. So across Kitty corner, across from that is vermillion. Vermilion is an art bar that is always showing different local artists work. And it's a crazy gallery.
It's the only gallery that's open till 02:00 a.m. so vermillion is amazing because it's a big enough gallery that they can have these crazy installations. So sometimes they have artists that work with light. Sometimes they have artists that come in and do murals on the wall or three dimensional art.
And you can go in there, there'll be a dance party that you can get drinks. And then if you don't feel like going to the dance party, you can just sit in the gallery area and just look at all the fucking crazy art. Or there are tables in the gallery area so you and your friends can sit around in the gallery and look at the art together and talk about it. Seattle Freeze is real. We love our city. We think of ourselves as neighborly and friendly, but we are terrible at making friends with each other or newcomers. And you're a newcomer for the first three years you live here. We don't trust strangers. You are a stranger forever here.
Unless you make friends at your job or at your hobby. It can take years.
And even after that, three years at least has passed.
Friendship here moves at a strange pace. I have friends here that I've loved, who love me, and we've been friends for over a decade, and they've never entered my apartment, and I've never thought about going to theirs.
The octopus bar.
Not in Capitol Hill, but it is one of my favorite places on earth.
It's got wonderful food, drinks. There's an art vending machine which, you know, features my snarky cards. Of course, they've got foosball pool, and there's art jammed into every. Everywhere you look, the whole place looks like a shipwreck. The walls have things that were found underwater, like, inside of them. You can trip out inside that bar and be completely sober.
So some other stuff that I want you to be aware of.
I think half of the Pacific Northwest population comes from Idaho and Illinois and other states, like, in the middle of the country.
And the people who move here were freaks there. Now they're here, but they're no longer the weirdest people in their towns. And speaking from personal experience, growing up in California, when you're a weird person in a small place, there are only a few people who can handle it. And you kind of have, like, people you've built in friends and enemies already because people are just reacting to you.
But when you're not the weirdest person in the room anymore, people aren't reacting to you. And Seattle is a weird, like, people weird out here. You're gonna see a lot of different kinds of styles as you walk down the street.
We have people who dog walk each other. If you identify as a puppy and you want to wear a puppy mask and put a collar on with a leash on it, and you find a person who identifies as a dog owner, or maybe they're just alpha dogs and they want to hold your leash while you two are out, like, running errands or whatever, that's cool. And Seattle aid stressed and business casual will not even wonder what you're doing. They'll just go about their business next to you. So imagine that you're from somewhere that rejected you so hard that you didn't really grow up with a lot of social skills. You moved here and realized you could now be as freaky as you wanted to, but you still don't really understand friendship or the steps people take in relationships to get closer. But add to that the cost of rent rising and food, so more and more of your time is taken up working and trying to figure out how to pay the bills. I've also been here for 15 years. I'm a Seattleite now. I'm trained not to expect friendship or not to really understand how to do it like a fucking shelter dog. That's what I say about us here, is that we're. We're just. We're happy in the rain.
We feel better when we're miserable, that kind of shit.
So whether you're visiting for a long time or a little while, try to make friends at work and be ready for it to be hard here. If you're just in town for a little while, you will have really wonderful interactions with people, and those people will mean it, but that is all you're gonna get from them for a while. That's. That's just. It's surface level shit. Like I said, it, things don't really move along at a normal pace here.
If you're coming to look here and you're looking for friends as well as things to do. I do run an open mic night first and third Sunday of the month, and that's a great place to meet people. If you want to watch people do things on stage, or if you want to practice doing things on stage, I make sure that it's a very welcoming environment. I also created a speed dating event called Snarky Singles.
And snarky singles helps people make friends, lovers, and enemies with each other. We. We do it at the Octopus bar, and people have made friends and lovers through it, so no enemies reported yet. So I cannot guarantee that results. But friends and lovers, if you're having a hard time, snarky singles is a good spot to make those kinds of relationships. So if you want to find me and talk to me and meet up, it's possible. I don't know if I'll be able to message me when you're coming through, because even though if I can't meet up with you, I'd like to hear what happens when you get here. I love this town. Everybody who lives here loves this town. And the Seattle freeze about being polite to your face with no depth to it. So if you're visiting for a short while, like I said, we will be kind to you. We will try to make sure you have a good time while you're here.
Thanks for listening, you guys.
[00:36:25] Speaker B: Taking so bizarre Lisa star, trying to get you to laugh at your star.
Felisa Star tells you what's up, wherever you are. There she is, a kooky glabber mouth. Who is your friend?
[00:36:57] Speaker A: Dicks. Okay, we love our dicks. Dicks is a hamburger joint. And since the panda is one of the food few food places that's open late, Seattleites will tell you to get some dicks in your mouth and then never explain it. So there are several locations. They're yummy hamburgers. I think.
I think they taste better than McDonald's, but I don't know how much by. It's been at least a decade since I've had one because between my gluten and my dairy allergies, I don't fast food very much anymore, which reminds me, if you have allergies, there are a ton of allergy free places and foods in this town. Rozzi's pizza has a gluten free, dairy free pizza that tastes like fucking heaven. It tastes like pizza. You'll do your happy butt food dance.
If you're allergic to something, there's a really good chance that you'll find restaurant or bar that will understand and keep you from shitting your pants. Most of us have those same allergies here. And pro tip, you don't actually even need to say allergy. You can say, I can't eat fill in the blank. It'll make me shit my pants. If you say that, everyone near you will work really hard to make sure you don't accidentally eat that thing. Because as much as you don't want to shit your pants, they don't want you to shit your pants more.
And it's not embarrassing. It's a warning.
So if you do actually shit your pants later, now it's you don't have to confess.
You can just say I told you so and blame whoever did not help you.
Keep yourself safe from the pants chitting.
So there's usually something fun happening around town whenever you come here. Keep an eye out while you're walking for flyers of upcoming events.
Also check event bright.
Sometimes we have park wide garage sales and Caturday, which is when people bring their cats on a leash to the park.
Every week there's an art walk in a different Seattle neighborhood you can look and see. Check which which art walk is running which whenever you're in town.
Thanks for listening to my thoughts you guys. I really appreciate it. And if you liked this episode of Lisa Star's thoughts of the day, then subscribe to this podcast. Feel free to kick me a tip. There are links to my Etsy site as well as the magic mind site and all of the wonderful places I told you to go. There are links for everything in the descripty and I will see you next time.
[00:40:24] Speaker B: Tells you what don't wear every you are Elisa star, the Lisa star. She is a booby blabber now.
